Heating With Dogs

Let's talk about a terrific new alternative-energy source that
can save you up to $4 billion a year on your home heating
bills. (This estimate is based on a typical 700,000-square-foot
roofless home on the planet Uranus; your actual savings may
vary.)

Now, you probably think this is another one of those
pie-in-the-sky articles about heating your home with molten
lava or some other project so absurdly difficult that your only
reaction is to pity the deranged fools who actually tried it.
You know the articles I mean:

Vermont Couple Finds New Source of Energy: Both
Expected to Recover
One day Jason and Fleur Partridge-Cardigan were sitting around
in the rustic old Vermont barn that they had converted to a
rustic old Vermont house by removing the cows, when an
interesting thought occurred to them: They were going to freeze
to death. It was then that Jason, who had quit a $75,000-a-year
job as a loan rejecter at a major New York bank to pursue a
lifelong dream of moving to the country and lifting large
objects by hand, had an idea. "Goat waste," Jason says. "It
seems so obvious now that I can't understand why more people
don't do it, unless maybe they don't like the threat of disease
and the fact that your clothes always smell like the northern
end of the New Jersey Turnpike."
So the Partridge-Cardigans got an old boiler and spent the
summer filling it with goat waste they had collected from their
neighbors. "They were very supportive," recalls Fleur. "Up to
that point, I don't think they really accepted us, but they let
us have all the goat waste we wanted. Sometimes they'd even
come over at night in their pickup trucks and dump it in our
foyer."
Then came the big moment, the first really cold day of winter,
when Jason went out to fire up the boiler. The neighbors
gathered around, smiling skeptically, but their smiles quickly
faded as the boiler began giving off a delicious, relaxing
heat, followed by shrapnel. "I figured it released around 65
million Btus," says Jason. "The only problem was that it
released them all in two-tenths of a second." But even with
this drawback, Jason and Fleur figure that, by 1992, their
novel heating system will have saved them more than enough
money to pay for their skin grafts.

This is not that kind of article. This article is about an
alternative heat source that's practical, safe, and available
everywhere: Dogs. Scientists don't know how they do it, but
dogs eat only a few cupfuls of really pathetic food every day,
yet produce thousands of cubic feet of warm, moist air per hour
by means of panting. The best dogs for heating are your large
breeds with good lung capacity, humid mouths, and extremely
tiny brains that cause them to go into hour-long, high-Btu
frenzies at the sound of their own parasites. Labrador
retrievers are ideal. It is a little-known fact that the
British royal family uses just two Labrador retrievers to heat
all of Windsor Castle.

You can also use smaller breeds, like those snotty little
yapping dogs often carried around by the elderly, but you'll
need 50 or 60 of them to heat an average house. This can be an
advantage, inasmuch as with one large dog your heat is either
on or off, whereas with many small dogs you can make fine
temperature adjustments by tossing maybe a half dozen out the
window.

If you're desperate, I suppose you could use other animals,
but they all have drawbacks. Cows, for example, don't pant.
Horses do pant, but they'll trip over your end tables and break
their legs and you'll have to shoot them. (The horses.) You can
forget about cats, which actually remove heat from rooms. You
can also forget about reptiles, which have a very low Btu
content. For example, to heat a typical suburban split-level
home, you would need 85,000 snakes or 330,000 toads, which
would be impractical for anybody who plans to do any
entertaining. So dogs are the way to go.

If you don't want to heat your home with dogs, you might be
stupid enough to try an idea proposed by Dave Freed of
Orrville, Ohio, who suggests using vinyl car seats as solar
collectors. "Strap a couple of those to your roof," writes
Dave, "and we can not only tell the Arabs to kiss off, but save
Detroit in the process!"

Makes sense to me. If any of you other readers have any swell
ideas like that, drop me a letter; maybe I can use it to ignite
my goat waste.

Dave Barry wrote this article for the
September 1983 issue of New England Builder. He is now running
for president of the United States. If elected, his highest
priority will be to seek the death penalty for whoever is
responsible for making Americans install low-flow
toilets.